Flash: FEMA Employees Union blames Bush

I just dropped by to see what was going on and wanted to update some of the news here.

Well, the orgy of blame continues with the FEMA Employees Union saying "It wasn't us." Specifically, it's Leo Bosner, president of the FEMA Headquarters Employees Union, who is doing the talking. Bosner's been with FEMA since the very beginning 26 years ago. He says the agency has been systematically dismantled since it became part of the massive Department of Homeland Security.

One of the big differences I see," said Bosner, "besides taking away our staff and our budget and our training, is that Homeland Security now, in my view, slows down the process."

The union warned Congress in a detailed letter about FEMA's decline a year ago. State emergency managers also warned Capitol Hill and Homeland Security just weeks ago that DHS was too focused on one thing -- terrorism. "

From AMERICABlog by way of DailyKos:

Embattled FEMA head Mike Brown insists he is well-qualified to lead the nation's disaster response agency - though he spent his time before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency probing whether a breeder was performing liposuction on a horse's rear end.

Some days the snark just writes itself, doesn't it?

From the "fox guarding the henhouse" files, Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo.com reports that "$50 billion of those recovery and reconstruction funds passed by Congress today are going to"--wait for it--"FEMA. FEMA is going to administer those funds. That is just friggin' crazy."

Says Marshall: "Even if FEMA were still a model government agency, as it was by most accounts in the 1990s, this would still be a really, really bad decision. As the title says, FEMA is an emergency management agency, not a reconstruction agency. It doesn't have the organizational structure or competence to run the economy of a significant chunk of the United States for the foreseeable future, which is what this amounts to. "

His conclusion: "This is a fiscal disaster waiting to happen, a truly terrible idea."

I know Howard has no control over the DCCC or the DSCC but he really needs to give Chuck Schumer a call and tell him to cut it out. Check out this New York Newsday headline, courtesy of TheRawStory.com:

Democrats' anti-Bush petition also seeks political contributions

WASHINGTON -- A new Democratic effort to whip up indignation about the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina also tried to raise money for Democratic candidates. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued an appeal Thursday urging people to sign an online petition to fire the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency over his handling of the Katrina response. After an inquiry from the Associated Press, the DSCC quickly pulled down the page and said they would donate to charity any money raised by the anti-FEMA petition. When recipients clicked on a link to the petition, the top center of the screen _ above the call to "Fire the FEMA director" _ had asked for a donation to the DSCC.

And Fafblog! has some good advice for us all so we won't have to wait for FEMA to swing into action when Hurricane Ophelia makes land. (Thanks to Atrios for the Fafblog! link)